concertina

Above the bookshelf sits an accordion
a birthday gift, she's older than me
but we're alike in dusty ways
leathery, blue, spiny ways,
weathered with sounds
and unspoken ones

for six years I've played a melody
of a painterly, light filled life:
beautiful squares to return to,
contain and be contained,
and stare into

I hold the accordion in my hands
pull out a slow, long wheeze
and contract into myself:
an uncomfortable 
yet necessary thing

I have given birth three times
surged, panged, sore and singing
a song as old as life itself -
three living bodies
emerged from my own

I prepared myself for the labouring
for expanding, expectantly,
but it was afterwards,
with babe at breast
I felt my body do a strange and painful thing:
my womb contracted,
retreated in completion,
shrunk itself

and so I think it is with all creative work
we puff up and shrink, concertina-like,
we make and miss notes, we glimmer with 
goodness, dust and who knows what else:
we grow, birth, contract, rest
again and again and again.